1. Field
Various embodiments disclosed herein relate to a method and apparatus for controlling visual formatting of an electronic document.
2. Related Art
An electronic document typically includes document content data and document support data. Document support data may include visual style data in the form of metadata for controlling visual formatting of the electronic document. Visual style data is information that determines how the document content looks or appears when displayed on a screen or printed on paper. For example, visual style data may include information regarding whether text content is in bold, italicized, or underlined, its spacing with respect to other document content, or other visual formatting characteristics.
Conventional systems for storing, viewing, and editing a document in a client-server architecture typically include a server and a thin client device. The server stores the document as a document file in a database and provides processing power on behalf of the thin client device. The document file includes document content data and document support data which is stored together so that the server can properly render the document for viewing or editing on the thin client device.
When organizations or users have multiple electronic documents, they may desire consistent visual formatting or style across the documents. An organization may use a style document with information regarding the desired visual formatting, such as descriptions or examples of visual styles. Where each document has its own document support data, a user must compare each document individually against the style guide to obtain the desired visual formatting. Alternatively, the organization may use a system that stores document content data separately from document support data. While this approach allows for centralized control over the visual styles, some documents may use many different visual styles to accommodate slight differences in visual formatting. For example, four separate visual styles may differ only in whether bold and italics formatting are enabled or disabled (i.e., styles with bold and italics disabled, bold only enabled, italics only enabled, both bold and italics enabled). With additional differences in visual formatting, the number of styles required to cover each variation may be confusing to the user.